Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

“Do you think you’re going to have another spell of amnesia?”

“I don’t think so. But I’d like to have you around if I do.”

“For how long?”

“Let’s begin with the weekend. How strange that it is Friday afternoon and that we are together now and can be together the whole weekend.”

“This all seems like a conclusion you have reached entirely on your own. What about me?”

“What about you?”

“Oh boy,” she said and commenced nodding and slapping again. “I don’t know.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Go?”

“Now. For the weekend.”

“You don’t fool around, do you?”

“Don’t talk like that”

“Why?”

“Because you know it’s not like that.”

“What is it like?”

“Where then?”

“I’m sorry,” she said and put her hand on his, this time a proper girl’s hand, not a nurse’s. “Rita and I are going to Fire Island.”

“Let Rita go and we’ll stay home.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Rita is very dear to me. I can’t hurt her feelings.”

“Why is she dear to you?”

“What right have you to ask?”

“Now I’m sorry.”

“No, I’ll tell you. For one thing, Rita has done so much for us, for me, and we have done so badly by her.”

“What has she done?”

“Oh Lord. I’ll tell you. You hear about people being unselfish. She actually is — the only one I know. The nearest thing to it is my sister Val, who went into a religious order, but even that is not the same because she does what she does for a reason, love of God and the salvation of her own soul. Rita does it without having these reasons.”

“Does what?”

“Helps Jamie, helps me—”

“How did she help you?”

“Mama took me up to Cleveland but I became terribly depressed and went home. I went to work in Myra’s real-estate office for a while, then came up here to school — and got horribly lonely and depressed again. It was then that Rita grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and began to put the pieces back together — in spite of what my brother did to her.”

“What did he do to her?”

“Oh,” she shrugged. “It’s a long story. But what a horrible mess. Let’s just say that he developed abnormal psychosexual requirements.”

“I see.” He frowned. He didn’t much like her using the word “psychosexual.” It reminded him of the tough little babes of his old therapy group, who used expressions like “mental masturbation” and “getting your jollies.” It had the echo of someone else. She was his sweetheart and ought to know better. None of your smart-ass Fifty-seventh Street talk, he felt like telling her. “I was wondering,” he said.

“What?”

“I love you. Do you love me?”

“If you don’t kill me. I swear to goodness.”

He fell to pondering. “This is the first time I’ve been in love,” he said, almost to himself. He looked up, smiling. “Now that I think of it, I guess this sounds strange to you.”

“Not strange at all!” she cried with her actress’s lilt.

He laughed. Presently he said, “I see now that it could be taken in the sense that I say it without meaning it.”

“Yes, it could be taken in that sense.”

“I suppose in fact that it could even be something one commonly says. Men, I mean.”

“Yes, they do.”

“Did you take me to mean it like that?”

“No, not you.”

“Well?”

“It’s time for me to leave.”

“You’re going to Fire Island?”

“Yes, and you’re sleepy.”

All of a sudden he was. “When will I see you?”

“Aren’t you coming to my birthday party Monday?”

“Oh yes. In Jamie’s room. I thought it was Jamie’s birthday.”

“We’re two days apart. Monday falls between. I’ll be twenty-one and Jamie sixteen.”

“Twenty-one.” His eyes had fallen away into a stare. “Go to bed.”

“Right.” Twenty-one. The very number seemed hers, a lovely fine come-of-age adult number faintly perfumed by her, like the street where she lived.

When his soil-bank check arrived on Friday, he, the strangest of planters, proprietor of two hundred acres of blackberries and canebrakes, was able to pay his debt to Dr. Gamow. Having given up his checking account, he cashed the check at Macy’s and dropped off the money at Dr. Gamow’s office on his way home Monday morning.

Sticking his head through Dr. Gamow’s inner door at nine o’clock, he caught a glimpse of the new group seated around a new table. It didn’t take twenty seconds to hand over the bills, but that was long enough. In an instant he sniffed out the special group climate of nurtured hostilities and calculated affronts. Though they could not have met more than two or three times, already a stringy girl with a shako of teased hair (White Plains social worker?) was glaring at a little red rooster of a gent (computer engineer?). She was letting him have it: “Don’t act out at me, Buster!” The old virtuoso of groups heaved a sigh. And even though Dr. Gamow opened the door another notch by way of silent invitation, he shook his head and said goodbye. But not without regret. It was like the great halfback George Gipp paying a final visit to Notre Dame stadium.

But that left him $34.54 to buy presents for Kitty and Jamie and to eat until payday Saturday. Sunday night he sat at his console under Macy’s racking his brain. What to give these rich Texas-type Southerners who already had everything? A book for Jamie? He reckoned not, because not even Sutter’s book held his attention for long. It was felt, fingered, flexed, but not read. His choice finally was both easy and audacious. Easy because he could not really afford to buy a gift and himself owned a single possession. Then why not lend it to Jamie: his telescope. The money went for Kitty’s present, a tiny golden ballet slipper from Tiffany’s for her charm bracelet.

“I don’t have any use for it right now,” said he to Jamie as he clamped the Tetzlar to the window sill. “I thought you might get a kick out of it.” Not for one second did he, as he fiddled with the telescope, lose sight of Kitty, who was unwrapping the little jewel box. She held up the slipper, gave him her dry sideways Lippo Lippi look, tucked in the corner of her mouth, and nodded half a millimeter. His knee leapt out of joint. What was it about this splendid but by no means extraordinary girl which knocked him in the head and crossed his eyes like Woody Woodpecker?

Jamie’s bed was strewn with neckties and books — three people had given him the same funny book entitled So You’re a Crock. The nurses bought a Merita cake and spelled out “Happy Birthday” in chart paper. The internes made a drink of laboratory alcohol and frozen grapefruit juice, as if they were all castaways and had to make do with what they had. From an upper Broadway novelty shop Mr. Vaught had obtained a realistic papier-mâché dogturd which he slipped onto the bed under the very noses of the nurses. As the latter spied it and let out their screams of dismay, the old man charged fiercely about the room, peering under appliances. “I saw him in here, a little feist dog!”

Screwing in the terrestrial ocular fitted with a prism, and focusing quickly on the Englewood cliffs, the engineer stepped aside. The patient had only to prop himself on an elbow and look down into the prism. A little disc of light played about his pupil. The engineer watched him watch: now he, Jamie, would be seeing it, the brilliant theater bigger and better than life. Picnickers they were, a family deployed on a shelf of granite above the Hudson. The father held a can of beer.

Once Jamie looked up for a second, searched his face for a sign: did he really see what he saw? The engineer nodded. Yes, he saw.